We'll be joining this tweet-up

Twitter facilitated discussion of Mobile strategy for social institutions: bit.ly/c53zos

Chatroulette

Fred Wilson (Www.avc.com) wrote about Chatroulette.com a little while back. I can say a lot of things but chances are most people experienced the same combination of fascination, revulsion, and sheer panic that I felt the first few times I used the service. I liken it to napster - the first time I used napster, I remember this feeling of sheer adventure, like anything was possible.

You feel a similar thing on chatroulette, until.....


What will really be a beautiful application of chatroulette, will be its embedding or integration into any social networking API. For example, imagine if you could do random video chats with, not people you're friends with, but with all your friends' friends? It would be exponentially more useful as you would get in touch with people who are marginally connected to you, and who its much more useful for you to meet, and the deletion of anonymity will force people to behave, which ultimately is a plus for the functionality.

Cheers to whoever gets that off the ground.
ayo

Should museums all have their own apps? or is a networked model better?

We're encounter this in every conversation. Everyone wants their own iPhone app? What are the advantages of everyone getting an app for themselves, vs. delivering their content on a standardized platform? We'll discuss standalone apps below, and return to networked apps later:

Advantages of a Standalone App:

• Branding: The institution maintains a distinct identity and delivers a custom experience for end users
• For "destination" institutions (of a certain size), standalone apps make more sense as the institution can likely attract the traffic to justify the expense and effort required to build an maintain it

Disadvantages of a Standalone App:

• High Expense: Custom app development runs from between $5,000 and $25,000 per platform, depending on how intricate or complex the app is. This is before any subscription fees to the app developer to support the app, and to add features as the institution requires.
• Concentrated Marketing: The institution has to shoulder the entire marketing burden - network apps enable institutions to build on each other's traffic, thereby spreading the marketing burden out and giving each institution access to visitors who may not have otherwise visited or known about the others.
• Lack of Distribution: Because app development is so expensive for each platform, an institution can easily be looking at anywhere from $15,000 - $75.000 minimum to develop apps to cover the major platforms (Blackberry, iPhone, and Android). This doesn't even include access to Windows Mobile and Palm which might become large players in the App space. What this ultimately means is that, to be truly represented across the platform space, most institutions will have to shell out an expense equal to someone's annual salary. That, is a tough spill to swallow.

 Next up, networked apps.
Ayo

New Revenue streams for cultural institutions?

We're starting to explore ways that institutions can use apps to generate additional revenues for the cultural sector. There are some obvious ones such as app sales, which we'll discuss, but there are some less obvious ones that require some fleshing out. Going forward, we'll be exploring as many of these as our partners are interested in.

1. App Sales; Fairly obvious, Apple takes a 30% cut I believe, and the Android AppMarket as well as the Blackberry AppWorld are not mature enough to know how well this plays out (in my experience). In addition, at least for the Blackberry, a lot of Apps are delivered directly to the device by hyperlink (rather than through a store) so its not really clear how RIMM intends to monetize this.

2. Donations: Fairly simple - both Paypal and Googlecheckout have easily configurable interfaces, and most users can be assumed to have accounts with either or both, as well as credit cards, which work with both GoogleCheckout and Paypal. Some cultural institutions that have a centralized giving mechanism (for example museums attached to universities) might have a problem with this initially, but I imagine that if this gains momentum everyone will be signing up, because, after all, more money is better non? Probably most useful for institutions or exhibitions with high affinity visitorship.

3. Sponsored Apps: Havent seen these much, but one can imagine that if an institution has a major patron, this can be an additional promotion outlet that requires minimal physical outlay. This should be particularly attractive to institutions with sizeable visitorship.

4. Advertisements: Obvious and as basic as app sales. Also particularly attractive to institutions with sizeable visitorship - one can imagine that this detracts from the user experience though....

5. Mobile Storefront: Mobile apps can be used as a way to deliver coupons to patrons, or payment method of patrons for gift store items...

thoughts?
ayo

The Power of Mobile Social Networks, and Live/Check-in Functionality

The guys at Foursquare (www.foursquare.com) have set up what is essentially live updating social networking functionality, that facilitates p2p interaction between users, be they friends or otherwise. They just passed a million users I think and at some point soon they'll gain the critical mass necessary for entire communities to populate themselves on Foursquare's system. In addition, the generation of a Foursquare API is a masterstroke as right now, Foursquare becomes useful to the developer community, in addition to its usefulness to the retail (individuals) and business communities.

We're exploring how to harness this theme; what can you do with a live check-in that wasn't previously available, and within what contexts does this add value? We've come up with a couple of things.

1. p2p interactivity; One of our very first conversations when starting Juncanoo a year ago was about the possibility that these mobile applications could generate interactivity between individuals at an institution. This is the most obvious, and to some extent, Fousquare already does this. I suspect that the developer community will eventually wire the API to the benefit of niche communities.

2. Live Couponing; the possibility that a business could send coupons to all the people currently checked into their location, that are time sensitive. The most obvious benefit of this, for example, is a bar or restaurant doing the easyjet model (live pricing) to drive volume to specific products that may elicit low sales volumes at specific times

3. Live Directory: This would be incredibly useful in certain professional contexts, such as lectures, meetings, conferences, and tradeshows. Imagine going to a conference and having a searchable, categorizable, indexable directory of all the people who are checked in, with specific interests, and being able to interface with their social networks (add as a facebook friend or linkedin connection, or follow them on twitter), being able to exchange contact information directly with individuals, and tagging/marking that contact info for follow up, and being in live, dynamic contact with the conference manager who can give live updates and changes to the event that you can follow on your device.

The possibilities are endless, and expand beyond the arts and culture universe - we'll be looking at all of them.

The following chaps are doing it well
www.foursquare.com
www.gowalla.com

Check them out.

Ayo

Mobile Apps or Browser Optimized Weblinks

Just read a phenomenal piece by Ted Forbes over at the DMA on their smARTphone project. Go to http://blog.tedforbes.com/2010/02/smartphone-tours-at-the-dallas-museum-of-art/comment-page-1/#comment-120 to check out the blog post, and dallasmuseumofart.mobi to check out their mobile web hosted smartphone tours.

This raises some serious questions; are mobile web based smartphone tours the wave of the future, or are apps the wave of the future? The reasons for each route are enormous; mobile web makes you platform agnostic - you dont have to develop an app to cover each platform. Apps however give you a high degree of customizeability, as well as the ability to connect directly with end users on an almost permanent basis. This connection creates greater opportunities to build communities, share knowledge and interact more deeply with visitors.

I suspect the proper route is a hybrid of some sort, and as time goes by, not only will we be exploring this, but all museums will as well.

Interesting Article: Walker Art Museum

On the Walker Art Museum's (Minnesota) experience running an audio tour for its Picasso Exhibit a few years back. Old, but still topical

http://blogs.walkerart.org/newmedia/2007/09/17/picasso-ipod-audio-tour-post/